Pakistan's two schools of thought

Western-style schools and religious madrassahs ready for different futures.

In Pakistan, a nation divided between militant Islam and Western-leaning modernity, Mehreen Shahid represents an increasingly unpopular yet pivotal minority.

A student at St. Paul's Cambridge School in this sprawling surburb of Islamabad, she is bright, open-minded, ambitious, and ready to see the world.

Ms. Shahid and her classmates dream, individually, of being highly educated, working as surgeons, engineers, software developers, architects, and physicists. Together, they dream of a better Pakistan, where the best and brightest don't have to leave the country to get ahead.

"Our generation is very intelligent, we can do a lot for Pakistan," says Shahid. Classmate Ali Arsan agrees. "I think we should go out on our own, seek to gain knowledge in the world, and return to our motherland and teach the people who can't afford to go outside."

Those who "can't afford to go outside" include the estimated 600,000 to 700,000 children attending the large and growing number of madrassahs, or religious schools, where the focus is on study and memorization of the Koran, Islam's holy book.

As Pakistan prepares to host an American-led military response against Afghan-based terrorist groups, education is one factor that will help determine the course of the nation's future.

For more than a generation, Pakistan's social divide has been drawn in this Muslim nation's schools. Westernized middle- and upper-class families send their children to private schools like St. Paul's, which, despite its name, is nondenominational. The poor attend either inadequately funded public schools or the madrassahs.

And this gap that marks Pakistan's social divide is turning into a chasm. Street protests, led by religious students, are a daily event. Radical clerics have begun to preach a violent, political version of jihad, or spiritual struggle, against those who support America, even Pakistanis.

Education is one of the key factors that will decide which direction Pakistan heads, whether toward the outward-looking secular state envisioned in 1947 by founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah or toward a more inward-looking path of Islamic conservatism, similar to that of Afghanistan's isolated theocratic rulers, the Taliban. For many Pakistanis, the outcome of this longer-term war is of primary concern.

"These so-called fundamentalists ... are becoming a menace now," says Akhtar Mahmud, a retired government official in Islamabad who describes himself as pro-Western. "Some government had to take them on if Pakistan was to carry on as a state. The US has its own reasons for being against this section of humanity, but people like me feel it is important that these people be contained and put an end to their expansion."

While the military government of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has recently begun to rein in sectarian political groups - banning three militant Islamic groups outright, and forbidding others from raising funds or displaying weapons - some Pakistanis argue that the effort is coming too late. After all, it is in the thousands madrassahs where this literal and political version of Islam is being preached to coming generations.

As Pakistan's 141-million population grows, and public schools fail to keep pace, it is madrassahs that are taking up the slack, and shaping the next generation.

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